I've been considering the question of how to strike out to go after the church's runaway sheep in a more deliberate, intentional way. Of course my mind went to, "How do I make this more efficient, to bring a group together." It struck me tonight that this very mindset is one of the failures in the church's outreach to runaway sheep. if there is an outreach, that is. The failure is in treating people as a category and lumping them all together. This is a common mistake the church makes in its attempts at outreach to different groups of people in general. They are trying to reach the "group," such as "millennials" or "youth" or the "unchurched," not individual people and tailor their "outreach" to what they think will attract that particular group.
But runaway sheep in particular must be approached as individuals, not a category, or collectively. Each sheep has its own story, its own hurt, its own questions. Some are recovering from abuse of some kind. Some were shamed. Others have a different story altogether. Tending a runaway sheep means building a relationship with that individual and responding to their needs, rather than putting on a tailored show, or a targeted "class" for a group of people to attend.
God doesn't do the General Education thing with us, yet within the churches, we've adopted the idea that we can do the same thing the same way with everyone and they'll be fine spiritually. Why? God doesn't. God works on the I.E.P. with people, recognizing that everyone had different spiritual, emotional, and mental aptitudes and every one learns differently. We need to recognize this too. When we try to shove everyone into the same church model, we leave too many people behind spiritually, and fail in our mandate to disciple the nations. Some people can learn in a large group setting, some require smaller groups, and some require a 1:1 learning environment.
The truth is that the church model we have now is a near complete failure for discipling anyone to follow Jesus Christ. It is all centered around the Sunday worship service and sermon where everyone meets collectively and receive group instruction about how to be a Christian from the pastor (best case scenario) for between twenty to forty five minutes, and that's it. It's like the old one room school house where students from every age and grade are all taught virtually the same thing by the teacher no matter how proficient they might actually be. As a result, the teacher has to teach the simplest material possible, and only cover more advanced material with the more proficient students if there's time. As a result, within the church, everyone is stuck going over material that is either too elementary, or too advanced for where they are at. Just like in the schoolhouse, the pastor most often turns to the "older" students to help tutor and educate the "younger" students, but that presumes that the "older" students know the material themselves.
The first priority of a pastor is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ himself or herself. The pastor must have an advanced grasp of remaining in Christ and ceding control to Him within themselves. If they don't, how are they going to teach anyone else how to do it? If you don't yourself understand what it means to "walk in the spirit" or "remain in Christ" how are you going to disciple anyone else to do it? You might be able to teach them how to memorize Scripture, certain doctrines, creeds, prayers, etc. But they won't be able to really make use of any of it without this key, core component of accessing their unity with Jesus Christ through submission to His life within them, because you yourself can't actually explain it or demonstrate it. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ means doing what he did, and learning to be like Him in every way, especially in His total submission to God the Father to where He didn't do or say anything that the Father didn't do or say through Him.
I am also increasingly of the mind that the bulk of this instruction should not be relegated to a couple of hours on a Sunday if you're lucky. It should be regular meetings throughout the week, similar perhaps to an intimate mentoring relationship or a master/apprentice relationship where the mentor instructs and demonstrates and the apprentice copies and learns by observation and by doing. The instruction should be tailored to the learner's needs, not the needs of either the mentor himself, or the needs of the least proficient person in the congregation. The mentor should be familiar with the learner's background, struggles, and personal pain in order to tailor their instruction and focus on those areas which need the most attention. Also, the mentor needs to be knowledgeable enough to be able to answer the difficult questions and objections with a response that will at least satisfy the learner and enable them to move past the question and make progress. The mentor in discipleship should never place an obstacle in a learner's path which the learner can't move past.
Thinking all of this through, the truth is that church needs to be done in a radically different way if our goal is to baptize and make disciples of Jesus Christ from everybody as He commanded. Jesus Himself discipled the twelve personally day in and day out for three years. Paul spent a few years in the desert being instructed by His Spirit before returning to Damascus. There was a reason Paul's greetings were so intimate in his letters and calling out individuals by name. He wasn't just being polite. He had invested himself in each of those people, and they him later on. The churches he started had a Sunday service, but "church" as such was seven days a week, twenty four hours a day. Consider also Barnabas who, upon Paul's rejection of John Mark, personally took the man under his wing to continue his discipleship apart from Paul until later in Paul's life he asked for John Mark personally. They formed intimate mentoring and accountability relationships with one another focused around submission to the psychology of Christ with whom they had been joined. They were, collectively, "the Church," but no one got lost or ignored by those charged with shepherding them.
Finally, I keep coming back to St. John, the last of the twelve to pass away. Eusebius tells a story of St. John in his later years, possibly in his eighties or nineties, where he had brought a young man to a pastor in a certain church to be looked after and discipled while he himself had to travel elsewhere. While John was gone, the young man fell in with gang members and became one of them, harassing, assaulting, and robbing people on the road. When John returned he inquired from the pastor as to where the "treasure" he had left with him was as he would like it returned. The pastor was confused as John had left no money or valuables with him. John then clarified, he meant the young man. The pastor then explained what had happened, that the young man had fallen away from the faith and run off with a dangerous gang of bandits. John then tore his clothes, if I remember right, but then set off up into the mountains looking for where he had been told the bandits made their camp. He found it, at the risk of his own life, and then found the young man. This octo- or nonagenarian old man who had been discipled by Jesus Himself then refused to leave. He spent day in and day out reasoning with the young man, praying for him right there, and presumably having run ins with the kid's buddies as well. Finally, after an undetermined amount of time focused on this one "runaway sheep," praying for him, mentoring him at the risk of his own life, the kid returned with John back down the mountain much to the shock and shame of the pastor who refused to leave the safe and healthy ninety nine in order to go after the one who was lost and sick.
I don't know exactly what this kind of a ministry is going to look like in the end, but I know it can't follow the example of the pastor in the story. I know that we as pastors can't follow the example of the pastor in the story if we are going to truly submit to Christ within us as John did. This kind of a ministry has to treat each lost sheep like a treasure more valuable than any other, like John saw the young man. It has to look, not at numbers of butts in seats (and paying tithes; let's be brutally honest), but at each individual person as priceless to God, and able to be discipled to follow Jesus Christ as He taught regardless of their difficulties or past trauma. This kind of a ministry cannot be willing to just let people fall away and blame it on their own lack of resolve, or faith, or understanding, or whatever. Even Jesus seemed to reach out to Judas right up until the moment he betrayed Him. He knew Judas was stealing from the pot, but He never just let him go. He knew Peter was going to publicly deny Him, but He still singled him out specifically after the resurrection. He didn't just let Peter go either. He fought for Peter in prayer before His death, and with His words of reconciliation after His resurrection. Can we as pastors, disciples of Jesus Christ, do any less? John certainly didn't think so. Jesus didn't write anyone off. We can't either.
But we do need to change how we think about this, and how we think about what it means to disciple someone.
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